Abstract The last decade has seen an increasing amount of research on so called “transitional” soils that are characterised by incomplete convergence to unique normal compression lines and/or critical state lines in simple laboratory tests. This topic has often provoked reaction, perhaps because some have seen it as a challenge to critical state frameworks of soil behaviour. A particular issue is whether incomplete testing or other test defects might cause such an apparent behaviour. Confusion around the topic has not been helped by the wide range of degrees of convergence seen for different materials and differences seen between convergence in compression and shearing. This paper proposes a unifying means of plotting laboratory test data from such soils that will hopefully provide a rational framework for such discussions, since it makes explicit the degree of convergence towards unique volumetric states for different forms of loading. Data are examined for three “transitional” soils. The results show that bringing about convergence for these soils would require strains beyond those that may easily be applied and that the lack of convergence cannot solely be an artefact of test defects. Plastic volumetric strain was found to cause much faster convergence than plastic shear strain.

中文翻译：

---

量化“过渡”土壤行为

摘要 在过去的十年中，对所谓的“过渡”土的研究越来越多，这些土的特点是在简单的实验室测试中不完全收敛到独特的法向压缩线和/或临界状态线。这个话题经常引起反应，也许是因为有些人将其视为对土壤行为的关键状态框架的挑战。一个特殊的问题是不完整的测试或其他测试缺陷是否会导致这种明显的行为。对不同材料的收敛程度以及压缩和剪切收敛之间的差异无助于围绕该主题的混淆。本文提出了一种绘制此类土壤的实验室测试数据的统一方法，有望为此类讨论提供一个合理的框架，因为它明确了不同形式加载的独特体积状态的收敛程度。检查了三种“过渡”土壤的数据。结果表明，为这些土壤带来收敛将需要超出可能容易施加的应变，并且收敛的缺乏不能仅仅是测试缺陷的人工制品。发现塑性体积应变比塑性剪切应变引起更快的收敛。